David Castillo Gallery is pleased to present Profane Expressions, curated by Glexis Novoa, with works by Sandra Ceballos, Hamlet Lavastida, Ernesto Leal, Yali Romagoza, and Ezequiel Suarez.

Emerging from a trajectory that began in the latter half of the 1960s, when language emerged as an independent medium, the artists in Profane Expressions explore the variety of modes language can be utilized in artistic practice to convey and manipulate meaning. The works in Profane Expressions reassert the notions of “message as medium” that were initially pioneered by artists like Lawrence Weiner, Robert Barry and Joseph Kosuth. The works function within forms of communication and use expression as their primary medium of aesthetic experience.

Sandra Ceballos, Ernesto Leal, Hamlet Lavastida and Ezquiel Suarez utilize text in their works to reveal the power of language as a tool to convey and distort meaning. In a series of paintings that conjoin the reproductions of anonymous medieval human dissections with political texts, Ceballos employs the compositional devices of painting and collage to confound the meanings of her source materials to re-present new subjects.

Ernesto Leal’s work examines the power of language in art criticism to the reception and interpretation of an artist’s work. Occupying the gallery walls where his work would be, are vinyl texts written by critics discussing Leal’s work. By substituting his physical work with these texts, Leal raises questions about the roles of artists and critics as evaluators of meaning in art.

Tropaje de Ideas (2009) is a wall installation composed of 59 sheets of paper in which Hamlet Lavastida has cut out a series of passages from a found speech. Similar to Ceballos, Lavastida re-appropriates found discourses to explore the psychology of self-reflection and criticism in the media.

Ezequiel Suarez’s drawings reveal the artist’s interest in the aesthetics of Outsider Art and the visual language of advertising and political slogans. Applying fashion and performance as formal languages, Yali Romagoza will present a series of male garments that explore the way clothing is used to communicate varying ideas of gender, power and identity.

David Castillo Gallery is proud to announce Melissa Diaz as Assistant Director of the gallery and the additions of Francie Bishop Good and Fabian Peña to the gallery’s roster of artists.

Melissa Diaz received her Master’s Degree in Art History from the University of South Florida where she focused on the early works of Michelangelo Pistoletto and his involvement with Arte Povera. She has held positions in several museums throughout South Florida including the Miami Art Museum and the University of South Florida’s Graphicstudio and Contemporary Art Museum. Additionally, she participated in the Peggy Guggenheim Collection internship program in Venice, Italy, where she was the first recipient of the Liesbeth Bollen Internship Award. She has organized several contemporary art exhibitions in Miami as an independent curator.

Francie Bishop Good employs the compositional structures of painting through photography to examine the psychological and cultural realms of the human condition. She was recently awarded a 2010 South Florida Cultural Consortium Fellowship for Visual and Media Artists. Bishop Good has shown previously with the gallery in the recent DCG Open and the group show Continuing Adventures of Our Heroine . Her first solo exhibition with the gallery will open February 2011.

Fabian Peña utilizes a variety of organic materials including crushed flies and cockroach fragments to create elaborate installations that reveal his command of composition and straddle the aesthetics of beauty and the grotesque. Peña’s work was recently included in the exhibitions Dead or Alive at the Museum of Art and Design in New York and New Work Miami 2010 at the Miami Art Museum. His first solo exhibition with the gallery opens October 2011.